


First blood

by jspringsteen



Category: Sicario (2015), Sicario (Movies), Sicario 2 (2018), Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 20:23:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15445113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jspringsteen/pseuds/jspringsteen
Summary: She’d almost succeeded in thinking of him as a faceless evil she could banish to the back of her mind, and here she is faced with his gratitude, his uncharacteristic sympathy. In one hand he held the gun, in the other her hand. Soft eyes and cold steel. It appears as if he’s sacrificed his very definition for her, this wolf that doesn’t eat the lamb.Alejandro and Isabel manage to make it across the border unseen. Who should they run into but Kate Macer?





	First blood

_“We wouldn’t miss this hour before the mouth and the teeth for anything.”_

\- Hélène Cixous – “What Is It O’Clock? Or The Door (We Never Enter)”

 

*

 

One of the strangest things about Alejandro is that he used to be a father. She cannot wrap her head around it; and yet he plays the role effortlessly, huddled beside his ‘daughter’, dressed in a faded button-down and a straw hat. Even knowing that it’s him, the play is convincing. When he looks at the girl Kate sees his gaze soften; it’s hard to tell if he just puts it on for the child’s benefit. In that moment, there is something reassuring and sturdy about him, his heavy, stocky body like a bulwark rather than a shield, that makes her blink away sudden tears and think of her own father. A university professor in Wyoming, respectable and happily married, still, to Kate’s mother, he might be Alejandro’s negative image.

It is her police detail that stops the bus with immigrants that has just crossed the border at Matamoros. The night patrols aren’t what she signed up for at the beginning, but her experience in Juaréz, funnily enough, had the sheriff practically begging her to go along on them. On any given night they go out, search vehicles for anything illegal – people, drugs, weapons – and make sure they go on to the right places. She enjoys it, it’s fairly predictable work, and she rests easy at night knowing she has done what she could to keep these people from becoming collateral damage in cartel wars like the ones she’s stood on the sidelines of. By now, she’s just happy she can rest easy at all.

No, he _is_ a father – Kate knows him well enough by now to know that the present tense is warranted. Becoming a parent changes your DNA, makes you privy to so many experiences and secrets of life that once you know them you are a parent forever, regardless of whether your children stay with you. Not that she would know. Hers was a childless marriage, but she thinks she would have welcomed them if the opportunity had presented itself. She used to look at Alejandro and wonder at the fact that some woman married him, saw in him an image of stability and faithfulness, created with him that holy love that leads to the birth of a child adored by both parents. This was just after the events across the border, after that afternoon when everything had fallen apart, splintered like a bone in his jaws, and she felt like her brain was overwired all the time, unable to make sense of her feelings and everything that had happened. She found it hard to imagine him as a lawyer, as a man who comes home at night and sits down to a peaceful dinner with his family. But then, it really isn’t such a stretch. She’s seen the photos of Alarcón family at their dinner table, gunned down in cold blood for the appetites their father kept hidden. Lying to children about what you do in the real world is easy, especially at dinner, the most vulnerable moment of the day: everyone gathered together, wolfing down their food, starving. The wolf may be there or looking on from the shadows, having put on his sheep’s coat for the occasion.

Alejandro has built his reputation upon being the wounded man, constantly sharpening his claws and awaiting his opportunity for revenge. Though his touch and his eyes can be gentle, as they were that afternoon when he first took her hand and then, almost tenderly, put a gun under her chin, he remains a wolf, solitary and deadly. _Alejandro works for anyone who will point him to the people that made him._ But who does he work for now? Has getting his revenge unmade him? Has it satisfied his appetite, or is he hungry for more?

When he left her room that day, she sank down on the couch and cried for what must have been an hour. Then she’d crawled into bed and slept for another twelve. She kept dozing and waking up again, imagining she heard the sounds of the front door opening, someone walking through her living room, the door to her bedroom creaking open. _Goddamn him,_ she’d thought, clutching the sheets until her knuckles turned white. _On top of everything, he’s managed to make me feel unsafe in my own fucking house._

She took his advice, though, about moving to a small town. Not because she actually believed what he said, that she wouldn’t survive there, but because the idea of taking up a completely different line of work didn’t appeal to her at all. She needed routine, work that she knew how to do yet was challenging enough to keep her from spiralling into the gloom she felt hovering just beside her constantly. She couldn’t show weakness when so many lives depended on her being stable every day. If you’re weak, the wolf will grab you, she told herself, realizing that she sounded like she was living out some grim fairy tale.

She directed her attention to refugees rather than cartels and moved to Harlingen, not far from Matamoros, where they were looking for a sheriff. She had never had much of a social life before, and so the silent separation from her life-as-she-knew-it that followed from the pain and the burning in her breast was easy. She simply wanted to try and get as far away from herself as she could. By now, she has somewhat settled into the skin that seemed to belong to a stranger at first: someone who cried at the smallest occasion, felt disembodied by sleeplessness, got frequent headaches and couldn’t go to sleep without checking if her doors and windows were locked at least three times after she’d gone to bed. Fear is a part of her now, and it’s more than a healthy dose of nerves before an important operation. She frequently dreams of standing on the lip of a shadow world, with an all-too-familiar hand stretched towards her, beckoning her to come down, but her desire to go has all but vanished. She merely feels a faint curiosity.

It didn’t take long for Harlingen to feel like home. The low, square houses in various tones of grey and beige; the asphalt roads and the hot air that vibrated above them, suggesting a permanent ghostly presence; the greasy spoons; the quick sunsets that turned the streets into blocks of yellow, blue and black – it felt familiar. She likes being close to Mexico, likes the hot dry winds and even the desert sand that covers her car, and the _taquerias_ that load her tacos so full of fresh guacamole that when her mother phones and asks what she’s had for dinner she can say _yes mom, plenty of vitamins tonight._ She’d brushed up her Spanish and settled into pushing papers for a bit, thinking it would restore her calm. A firefight in an alley, an armed robbery at the grocery store. Nothing very exciting. But at the back of her mind, almost every day, was the thought that she might come home and find him sitting on her couch, ready to rape her or kill her or kiss her or otherwise drag her along in his undertow, back underground into the tunnels, away from the daylight. Back to where she had no right to be.

So why did she want him to?

He never came. Somehow, that was worse. He’d made her a promise, wolf to sheep. The promise was this _: I’m going to eat you up_. She was destined for devourment, and he left her waiting with her neck bared. She’d seen his teeth in front of her, heard the empty snap of his jaws. Hallelujah – to almost be eaten and then not eaten. She should be relieved. Instead, she finds herself begging him in her thoughts: _I beg you, eat me up._ _Bite me, at least. Draw first blood._ As proof. Of what? That she survived. _Show me I’m right to be scared of you, or else I’m going to eat_ you _up._

 

 

Tonight, she recognizes him immediately. She knocks on the door for the driver to open it, then goes inside the brightly lit bus. He glances up at her, showing no sign of recognition. Kate’s heart jumps into her throat and she knows the shock must be written across her face. Next to him is the little girl, staring up at her with quick coal-black eyes; her face is the refugee’s mask of hope mixed with fear. Kate glances away quickly, scanning the rest of the bus. The passengers shift uncomfortably. She looks at the faces carefully, but nobody looks at her aggressively, or in panic. Some of them yawn, having just woken up from a doze.

“Alright,” she calls over her shoulder, “search it.”

She starts at the front as her colleagues file past her towards the back of the bus. Soon she is with Alejandro and the girl, taking out her notebook as she asks them:

“¿Adónde vais?”

He meets her gaze, holds it steady, pretends he doesn’t know where he is. He says: “Vamos a Tejas. No se dónde.”

“¿Tu solamente? Y ella?” Her voice trembles as she looks down at the girl, who still says nothing.

He hesitates for just a second before he replies: “Los dos. Es mi hija.”

She knows it’s not true, but what can she do? Call him a liar and an asshole in front of the whole bus? Kate thinks quickly – she must get him alone. She asks for their papers, pretends to see there’s something off, and then beckons them.

“Come. Out of the bus.”

She doesn’t look back to see if they follow her. Outside, two sergeants are shining their flashlights into the luggage hold, while one man wearing a bowler hat points at his suitcase somewhere in the back.

She turns around, and Alejandro stands before her, his hand on the girl’s shoulder. He looks exactly the part; unshaven, his hair a greasy mop under the floppy hat, stripes of dirt on his shirt and on his hands. A far cry from the well-groomed man in the tan suit she saw ambling down the runway two years ago. The girl is dressed in seemingly random pieces of clothing, including a man’s baseball jacket, and her hair is cut off so that she almost looks like a boy.

“I didn’t expect to see you here.” She doesn’t expect him to speak first, and is slightly taken aback when he does. She crosses her arms, instinctively.

“You told me to move. I moved.”

“Not so far away.” He almost smiles. Kate shrugs.

“I like Texas. Can’t get better tacos anywhere in the US.”

He hums in agreement. The girl looks from him to her with a puzzled look.

She steps closer to him and asks in a low voice, “What are _you_ doing here? Who is she?”

Alejandro just looks at her, as if debating whether or not to tell her the truth. _You better,_ Kate thinks, _if you want me to help you._ Then he says: “It doesn’t matter who she is. I told Matt I’d help her safely across the border.”

“ _Matt?_ ” Kate echoes. “Oh, I’m not surprised. Still cashing in on the lives of poor Mexicans, huh?”

“If you had _any_ idea what is happening, you wouldn’t be laughing, Kate.” His voice is a hiss, low and cold, and Kate feels the fear slipping back into her veins.

“I’m not.” She’s breathing quickly. It’s the closest she’s been to him since the afternoon in her living room – though they’ve been a lot closer than that in her dreams, dreams that make her wake up sweaty and horny and out of breath.

 “Something went south, you don’t have to know what, and now her life’s in danger.” As if it’s an afterthought, he adds, “Both our lives are in danger.”

Even in his farmer’s getup his intense stare and low voice are enough to make her shiver. She has to stop and think. Glancing around, she sees her colleagues wrapping up the operation, and she tells him: “We’re taking you to the station. There’s a phone there, you should be able to make contact with Matt. Get back on the bus.” And she turns around, relieved to escape his hypnotic eyes, and walks around to check in with her colleagues. From the corner of her eye she sees the two of them step back into the bus, the girl a mere shadow in Alejandro’s wake.

 

 

**II**

 

 

In the beginning, she dreamt nearly every night of running, sometimes towards and sometimes away from him, being chased down and seeing the fangs come closer, closer, until at the last moment they clamp shut and graze her cheek, sending a ripple of horror down her spine that feels so delicious she feels ashamed of it when she wakes up. Though she has grown used to these visions, she is anything but insensitive to them. Like debris clinging to the eye of the tornado, every thought and every image is inseparable from him. Even now, when she tries her best to steer away from the temptation of booze and pills to lie down in bed and read a book, she’ll barely finish a page before the images pounce upon her, sensing her defenses are down. Every time her mother suggests a therapist she brushes it off. She has never been a very secretive person, but this secret she keeps from everyone – the indescribable physical phenomena, choosing not to tell anyone, the constant flutter of fear, are things she only recognizes from times she has been deeply in love. That, in the beginning, was enough to send her to a bottle, if only to rinse out the dirty aftertaste that the word love has acquired for her. Would someone who loved her shoot her in the chest, make her fear for her life? Wouldn’t an act of love be to devour her completely, saving her from future pain rather than teasing her with the brief euphoria of escape?

Though she hardly ever wakes up any more with a raw throat that tells her she’s been howling in her sleep, or feels that those feelings of powerlessness follow her into her work day and make her feel like he’s looking over her shoulder, she knows that she’ll never be completely free of him. It’s like she’s carrying something around she can never look at in the daytime; only when she crawls under her sheets, in the dark, can she take it out and examine it closely.

She begins to understand him, after a while. Looking at the wreckage of her life and being able to point the finger at the exact moment and person that caused it, she, too, toys with the idea of making him pay for what he’s done. They thought she was weak, that she was not a wolf. She would show him. _This is how he must feel,_ she realised with a start. Only he felt he had to pursue his vengeance to its bloody end. He had nothing else to live for. He’s given her back her life while simultaneously making her feel like it wasn’t hers to have. Only now does she realise just how his rescue makes her indebted to him.

 

 

As they drive to the police station Kate keeps glancing at the bus in her rear-view mirror. It wouldn’t be the first vehicle to suddenly stop, causing the police car behind it to slam into it, or to make a U-turn without warning, depending on the driver’s level-headedness. Thoughts spring to mind of Alejandro hijacking the bus, but she dismisses them quickly. He depends on her to get them out safely, and she knows it.

She steps out to see the bus lumbering into a parking spot, the doors opening and the stream of people exiting the vehicle. Alejandro and the girl are the second to last to step out, followed by a man in a dark hoodie who keeps his eyes trained on Alejandro’s back. _Trouble,_ Kate thinks, and she rushes forward to meet them.

“Come on. Let’s go inside.”

As they follow the crowd through the doors of the station Alejandro’s hand brushes against hers, and then again. Kate keeps her gaze straight ahead, ignoring this small gesture of pacification, though she can’t quell a sense of disappointment when he doesn’t do it a third time. She is hardly ever touched these days except for the occasional handshake. She points Alejandro to the payphone in the corner, still without making eye contact, and marvels at her own cool exterior, rattling off procedure after procedure the way she normally does.

The girl has found a chair and looks forlorn, glancing about her constantly. Nobody seems to be paying any attention to her. Kate fills up a cup with water and brings it over. When she squats down next to her, the girl gives her a terrified look.

 “Calmate,” Kate says, keeping her distance. “Como te llama?”

The girl looks her up and down. “Carina,” she says cautiously.

“Carina,” Kate repeats. “Do you speak English?”

The girl hesitates, then nods.

“Can I get you anything else?”

She shakes her head. Kate sees her glance at the corner, and follows her gaze. Alejandro has his back to them, one arm resting on top of the payphone.

“Carina,” she says, “can I sit down?” The girl doesn’t reply, so Kate cautiously takes the seat next to her.

Trying to keep the nerves from her voice, she says: “I need you to tell me why you are here, and why with him.” Carina bites her lip. Her guarded silence tells Kate all she needs to know about the threats she’s probably received.

“He is my father,” she says, eventually. Kate wants to shake her, tell her to wake up, but she quickly calms herself. _She is not you. There may be another story._ She sighs and shakes her head.

“Honey, I know him. He is not your father.” She lays her hand on Carina’s, who doesn’t move it.

“I can help you if you’ll be honest with me. What happened? How did you end up here?”

Carina swallows, darts another look at the payphone. Alejandro is shaking his head at something the other person – Matt, probably – is saying.

“I was kidnapped,” she says, quickly. “Alejandro saved me.”

“Did he now?” Kate studies her face, trying to keep a reassuring smile on her lips but feeling it go sour. As she well knows, you can’t every properly repay somebody who saves your life and makes a gift of it – you’ll always be indebted to them. She feels Alejandro’s eyes on her. So this is his scheme to become friendly again with the cartels after killing one of theirs – giving them a life in return?

“Saved you from whom?”

“Bad guys,” Carina says.

“Bad guys,” Kate repeats. “You’re scared of them, aren’t you?”

Carina nods.

“You think he will protect you?”

She hesitates.

“Are you scared of him?” Carina’s lip begins to tremble.

“Yes… no. I don’t know.”

Kate looks into her big eyes, and reaches up to take her by the shoulders. “You should be,” she whispers, urgently. Carina looks at her with wide eyes,

“They’re picking us up in two hours.” Alejandro’s voice interrupts them, and Kate looks up to see him standing over the two of them. Though he’s talking to Carina, he’s looking at Kate. His face is unreadable.

“Good,” she says, getting to her feet, leaving one hand on Carina’s shoulder. She lifts her chin slightly as she holds his gaze. It must be wonderful, she thinks, to be a man like him, warping reality at your convenience. Of course, she’s no stranger to coverups of particularly gruesome situations, but the matter-of-factness with which he entered – _broke into_ – her apartment, pushed a nondisclosure agreement under her nose like it was a restaurant check, and forced her to sign away everything she believed in – her credibility, her sanity, her belief in fighting the good fight – infuriates her still. Rewriting history with the scrawl of a pen, the kiss of a gun, the stroke of a thumb.

 Alejandro opens his mouth.

“Where’s your bathroom?”

She’d expected him to say something else. Wordlessly, she points him in the right direction, watching him walk away.

He’s only taken a few steps before the man in the black hoodie walks up behind him, bumps up against him and continues walking towards the exit. Alejandro lets out a gasp and stumbles, clutching his side. The man in the hoodie begins to push through the crowd and throws open the doors with a crash, slipping outside. Shocked noises rise up around her as several officers jump up from their chairs and begin the pursuit. Kate gets to her feet and rushes over to Alejandro.

“You’re alright, you’re alright,” she says, automatically, squatting down and breathing quickly. He is on his knees, clutching his side, where a dark stain rapidly flowers down his ribs and across his stomach. She takes his hand, which comes away wet and bloody, and looks down at him. His eyes are wide with shock and hatred. It takes her breath away for a moment, but then she snaps into work mode again.

“I’m gonna take you to the hospital,” she says, “alright? It’s just down the road.” He nods, breathlessly, gritting his teeth.

“Keep pressure on that,” she commands him. She drapes his arm over her shoulders and helps him up. “A refugee got stabbed. I’m taking him to the emergency room,” she says to her radio, hearing the faint buzz and crackle of “copy that” as she clips it to her belt again. Alejandro is panting and leans on her heavily. When they reach her car, she pulls the door open and helps him into the front seat. He winces as he pulls his arm from her neck. For one long second they look at each other, and for the first time she sees fear, real fear, in his eyes. Then she slams the door and rounds the hood over to the driver’s side.

 

 

**III**

 

 

Oh, how she wanted to impress him, that first day they met. She was feeling insecure, uncertain about the whole scheme, until he stepped into the airplane cabin and sat down across from her. She kept glancing over at the cool, handsome figure in the white suit – the very colour seemed to be created for him – and let herself admire him freely when he fell asleep. She had been handpicked for this operation – she would show them that she, too, could stand up in the deep end. She failed to take the nightmare he so suddenly woke up from as an omen, failed to see herself in his position just weeks later. Failed to see that she had been targeted by the wolf to be separated from the flock, as its most gullible member.  

 

 

It’s hard to reconcile Alejandro the wolf with Alejandro the bleeding human being sitting under the sterile lamps of the emergency room. He looks even older here, with bags under his unfocused eyes, his skin pale from the blood loss. Kate watches as the nurse peels away his wet shirt, revealing his torso, his whole left side spattered with blood. A small hole like a dark eye sheds slow red tears, and though it makes her feel slightly sick to look at it she finds she cannot look away. _Human after all_ , she thinks.

The sheep saving the wolf. It would have been logical, perhaps even expected, had she refused to help him and seized her chance to liberate this girl from whatever nefarious scheme Alejandro and Matt have cooked up together. But something in his eyes, in the way he looked at Carina, had given her pause. On some level, she sensed he was trying to find the best way out of this thing, not just for himself but for her. Arguably, that’s what he had done with her, too. He needn’t have come to her apartment to threaten her; he could have thought a threatening phone call and the documents in her mailbox were enough _._ But he sensed that to really make her feel as if her life was in danger, she needed the gun, his fingers brushing hers, the eyes she could find herself looking into forever and discovering new fears in all the time. To almost die is to feel the euphoria of being alive.

“A pinprick, is all,” the nurse says. She catches Kate’s eye, and shrugs. “We get them here with they bellies cut all the way open. Look like he got stabbed by an amateur.”

 _A warning,_ Kate thinks. _A reminder of who’s really in charge._ Understanding begins to dawn on her as she looks at Alejandro. _Things really must’ve gone south._

She doesn’t understand how he does it, living day in, day out knowing that there are people out there who want to kill him. It’s a feeling that haunted her for months after the events in Juaréz. She was convinced he was going to come for her and finish the job, or send someone after her if he thought she was breaking their agreement. The fear was actually addictive. It gave her reasons not to go outside, to shut out Reggie and her parents, and when she saw him on the bus, she again felt that thrill, that thrilling fear licking its way down her spine. The only thing she can compare it to are the horror movies her brother watched when they were teenagers. He liked being scared, he said, it gave him a thrill. He’d watch one and then go out for a walk in the graveyard by himself. The neighbours whispered and her parents worried, but now, Kate thinks she understands. You can believe in the danger and not believe in it at the same time. The thrill, the pleasure lies in the place where they overlap. But when Kate began working for the CIA, it became vital to believe absolutely in the danger or not believe in it at all. Calculating risks became her second nature. She thought that had made her able to bid farewell to these demons, but now, Alejandro has nested himself in that sweet spot, the inbetween, where being scared shitless becomes a strange kind of pleasure.

The more she knows about him, the more weakness he shows her, the more scared she gets. She wonders how he’ll punish her for seeing him like this. Before, when she felt ready to shoot him, he punished her with calm tenderness. _Well, we’re square_ , she thinks. _He’s saved my life, I’ve saved his. Does that give me the right to give him an extra forget-me-not trauma to ensure we’ll see each other again?_

Her eyes roam over his torso as the nurse cleans up the blood. Somehow, she’d expected it to be dotted with scars, but his skin is smooth. She watches the black zigzag of the thread through puckered folds of skin. Her eyes drift up to meet his, and his look is so heated that she feels her cheeks burning.

“All done,” the nurse announces, and hands Alejandro his shirt back. He puts it on, wincing, then carefully lowers himself off the table.

Kate moves to support him, but he shakes his head almost imperceptibly, and makes his way out the door.

“Thanks,” Kate tells the nurse, and follows him. He is halfway across the parking lot before she can catch up.

“Alejandro,” she says. It’s the first time she’s spoken his name aloud in years. “Slow down.”

He looks at her over his shoulder, and gives her a weak smile.

“Not your first stab wound?” She reaches the car before him and opens the door to the passenger seat. Before he lowers himself into the car, Alejandro pauses, and looks at her over the doorframe.

“The second, actually,” he says, then ducks his head to get in the car. Kate lets out a dry laugh.

“That sounds like a story.” She gets in and fastens her seatbelt.

“So are you gonna tell me what’s going on?” she asks, readying herself for his flat “no”. But he sighs, and rubs his face.

“I can’t tell you everything.”

“But…?” Unconsciously, she holds her breath. She starts the car and puts it in reverse.

“But you deserve some measure of the truth,” Alejandro says. He lies prone in the seat, his head resting against the top, and he’s looking at her. Kate tightens her grip on the wheel, feeling his eyes as if they were shooting infrared beams.

“Matt’s idea was to play two sides against each other,” Alejandro begins. “Carina was the target, the daughter of someone high up. We kidnapped her pretending to be one side, then tried to return her pretending to be the other. Something went wrong, and we had to get her across the border one way or another. I vouched for her, tried to help her.” He sighs, and closes his eyes. “And now we’re here.”

Kate frowns, processing his words. “Is it to do with the cartels again?”

“Trust me,” Alejandro replies, his eyes still closed. “It’s better if you don’t know.”

 _Trust you, not on your life._ “So you had to get her across the ordinary way. You know, the way all poor people do it, not with helicopters and Humvees and secret passwords, but with a bus, depending on other people.”

He doesn’t reply. She glances over; he seems to have fallen asleep. His face looks grey under the orange lights lining the road. His arrogance, and Matt’s, angers her. Do they even consider that these are people’s lives they’re playing with? Oh, just a dead Mexican or two, it’s no big deal, even when they haven’t done anything.

She wonders if his love of fear is what keeps him working. It’s like soldiers returning from a war: most of them want nothing more than to go back, because they go crazy back in the real, boring world. She looks over at his prone body, almost feels something soften in her chest at the look of him.

“Watch the road,” Alejandro murmurs. His eyes are still closed. A shiver runs up Kate’s arm and she jerks her head forward. _Goddamn it._

The radio crackles and Sergeant Martinez informs her that the man in the hoodie has escaped. They’ve taken Carina into a separate room at the detention center, he says. She glances at Alejandro, whose eyes are open again.

When they get back, it’s almost two am. Matt’s car should be along soon. She pulls into the parking lot, slams the door and crosses to the other side to help Alejandro out. She takes his arm, helps lift him up as he clutches the top of the door, hoisting himself out of the car. For a moment, their faces are so close that she thinks he is going to kiss her. But he doesn’t; his tired, drugged-looking eyes search her face and he mumbles, “Thank you, Kate. Really.”

He refuses her help in walking back to the station and Kate trails after him, puts on her noncommittal look before she goes through the doors and sees her colleagues again. One of them points Alejandro towards the holding cell where Carina is. Kate sits down behind the desk and closes her eyes, heaving a deep sigh, feeling tears burning behind her eyelids. She startles and opens her eyes when she feels a hand on her shoulder. It’s Sergeant Burnley.

“Ma’am, are you okay?” She blinks rapidly, then turns to him with a curt smile. “I’m fine, Sergeant. It’s been a long night. Would you get me some coffee?”

“Of course.” He leaves and Kate ducks under the desk, pretending to retrieve a pen, and allows two hot tears to spill down her cheeks. She breathes in and out with a shudder, wipes her cheeks and her eyes, and goes back up.

 

 

**IV**

 

 

She wonders if Matt himself is going to come and pick them up. Probably it’ll be just an aide of his.

Alejandro emerges from the cell, catches her eye, and inclines his head to the right. Kate gets up and follows him into the hall, past the refugees who are sleeping in their seats and waiting for their pickups. The majority has gone already.

She stands next to the payphone, her arms folded, looking straight at him. He is regarding her with tired eyes and a look she might call fatherly, the same look he gave her in the briefing room the morning after she was almost strangled. For a moment she wonders what it would be like to go with him. Into the unknown, running away like two lovers on a cinema screen; into the shadows and tunnels where she imagines he dwells. For surely somebody like Alejandro doesn’t go into broad daylight often, preferring the crepuscular lifestyle of the people he works with and for, in the borderland, crossing when the light is low and the sounds of the night muffle the splash of water, the buzz of a silenced firearm and the cough of people in the trunk. To exist under the radar. Evidently, judging by the fine suits he wore in Juaréz, it’s a living. But is it a life?

He says, “Thank you for saving my life.”

She shrugs. “You saved mine. We’re square.”

He studies her from under his eyelids, smiles a little, as if deciding to let her believe this. “That’s true.”

He lifts his hand to her cheek, the hand that still has his wedding ring, the way he did that afternoon, and rests his thumb in the hollow below her ear, where he must surely feel her pulse pick up a gallop. Kate flinches and tightens her jaw rebelliously. She hates his invasive touch, driving her against walls both in her mind and in her house, hates it and craves it at the same time because she is rarely touched any more. The nightmares are few and far between now; she’d almost succeeded in thinking of him as a faceless evil she could banish to the back of her mind, and here she is faced with his gratitude, his uncharacteristic sympathy. In one hand he held the gun, in the other her hand. Soft eyes and cold steel. It appears as if he’s sacrificed his very definition for her, this wolf that doesn’t eat the lamb. Is it still a wolf? Isn’t is a delupinized, a non-wolf, a wolf-but? No, her fear is still there, and still justified; right up to the last second he could eat her like the little girl he presumes her to be. She believes in the wolf, and she’s afraid. But she’s not a lamb.

She has no doubt that he would have killed her; the speed with which he shot her point blank in the chest proves that much. _Never point a gun at me again._ Never hunt me down. She thought it would be the reverse, that he would come to hunt for her, but he never came. She wishes she could hold this against him – the debt that he must now pay to _her._

She reaches up to lower his hand, mirroring his movement from that afternoon, and he drops it willingly; his eyebrow quirks up slightly.

“Let’s keep it professional,” she says, aware of the telltale tremble in her voice, but it gives her some room to breathe, quiets down the rush of blood in her ears. He smiles. His fingers brush hers, lightly, sending her heart into her throat.

“I’ll be seeing you, Kate.”

He walks away and she sees him guide Carina through the doors towards the red taillights hovering outside. Hugging herself, she stares at the wall, then buries her nails in her shoulder blades, fighting the urge to scream. She has an awful premonition that he’s speaking the truth.

**Author's Note:**

> Yep... just can't get enough of these two. And this one actually has a plot!  
> I was inspired to write this when I read Hélène Cixous' essay The love of the wolf. There are some echoes of it in here.  
> Please comment if you enjoyed!


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